A review of Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (Verso, 1986)

No sane observer of the British political scene could doubt that the current is pulling rightwards inside the labour movement. The New Statesman recently described the hard left inside the Labour Party as ‘the dog that did not bark’: ‘Labour’s Left has, since the near miss of Tony Benn’s attempt at the party’s deputy leadership in 1981 and even more since the electoral debacle of 1983, declined to the point of near invisibility’.